Paolo blog: Ramblings on Web2.0, Trust, Reputation, Recommender Systems, Social Software, Free Software, ICT4D and much more

In 2008, Google opened a project competing with Wikipedia: Knol. The project at January 2009 had grown to 100,000 articles, something it is hard to define a success.
Since then it seems the attitude of Google towards Wikipedia have changed a bit, more like “Ok, you (Wikipedia) can become the de facto monopolist in the user-generated creation of knowledge, we have other and more challenging competitors to defeat now, we will incorporate you later on down the way”.
Two example of this new attitude (according to my view of course) are the Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge and the Health Speaks Wikipedia pilot project.

The Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge was a challenge launched in November 2009 by Google. The task was to translate English Wikipedia articles into Kiswahili or to write Wikipedia articles from scratch. Participants received prizes such as laptops, mobile phones, prepaid internet access modems, Google T-shirts. Google stated goal: “We hope to make the online experience richer and more relevant for 100 million African users who speak Kiswahili.”

The results might not be that great. The Wikipedia Signpost of 2010-07-26 quotes from the blog post what happened on the Google Challenge @ the Swahili Wikipedia:

Nearly all of them are gone now and left a lot of articles which often are not really state of the art formally and also linguistically … they don’t care because they were there for laptops and other prizes (no need to be rude, but it hurts me pretty bad).

An article in New York Times is similarly not exalted. The last paragraphs of the article comments on Google-generated content in Wikipedias in languages of India.

However, the surge in content created by Google’s project to improve these sites still needs work, according some local site administrators. For example the Wikipedia in Tamil – one of the underrepresented South Asian languages – the entries covered “too many American pop stars and Hindi movies, which Tamils may not need as a priority.” There was also sloppiness in language and coding.

Despite these concerns, Tamil Wikipedia plans on working with Google to continue the additions. The Bengali Wikipedia, however, took greater umbrage and simply deleted the Google-generated content. The Bengali Wikipedians explained that the material simply did not meet their standards.

The Health Speaks Wikipedia pilot project was announced yesterday and is focused on increasing the quantity and quality of online health information in languages spoken in developing countries. They started a pilot project to support community-based, crowd-sourced translation of health information from English Wikipedias into Arabic, Hindi and Swahili Wikipedias.
They have chosen hundreds of good quality English language health articles from Wikipedia that they hope will be translated with the assistance of Google Translator Toolkit, made locally relevant, reviewed and then published to the corresponding local language Wikipedia site. They have also funded the professional translation of a small subset of these articles. And they are additionally providing a donation incentive to encourage community translators to participate. For the first 60 days, they will donate 3 cents (US) for each English word translated to the Children’s Cancer Hospital Egypt 57357, the Public Health Foundation of India and the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) for the pilots in Arabic, Hindi and Swahili, respectively, up to $50,000 each. This means that community translators will help their friends and neighbors access quality health information in a local language, while also supporting a local non-profit organization working in health or health education.

Wow! The Google Prediction API enables access to Google’s machine learning algorithms to analyze your historic data and predict likely future outcomes. Upload your data to Google Storage for Developers, then use the Prediction API to make real-time decisions in your applications. The Prediction API implements supervised learning algorithms as a RESTful web service to let you leverage patterns in your data, providing more relevant information to your users. Run your predictions on Google’s infrastructure and scale effortlessly as your data grows in size and complexity.
Uses
* Language identification
* Customer sentiment analysis
* Product recommendations & upsell opportunities
* Message routing decisions
* Diagnostics
* Document and email classification
* Suspicious activity identification
* Churn analysis
* And many more…

The URL for generating the following pie chart on the fly via Google charts, containing all the needed parameters (that’s why it is so long), is
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chxt=x,y&cht=p&chco=FAFAFA,FFFF00,FAFAFA&chs=600×300&chtt=Percentage%20of%20Google%20Chart%20Which%20Resembles%20Pac-man%20Chart%20title&chd=t:10,80,10&chl=Does%20not%20resemble%20Pac-man|Resembles%20Pac-man which produces

From mattcutts.

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Read more on Google blog.
Everything seems originated by cyber attacks trying to access Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
I cannot read what is the real message between the line and the real reason but this seems big news.

UPDATE: thanks to the comment by Vincenzo, I now know this was a April 1st fool! Thanks Vincenzo! The application form with its strange questions could have me realize that! Example:
# I am a world-class expert in
physics
medicine and first aid
engineering
Guitar Hero II

Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars, by Google and Virgin.
The vision is heavily based on Open Source and Crowdsourcing. Clever move, both from PR perspective and from practical perspective!

It comprises three equal partners: Google, Virgin and a diffuse network of talented individuals who want to participate in our mission.

Who do I see as the perfect leader for this project? Yochai Benkler, fabolous author of the book “The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom” and of “Sharing Nicely: On shareable goods and the emergence of sharing as a modality of economic production”, most inspiring paper I ever read.

More from http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html:

A post-post-industrial economy
What does “open source” mean in the context of a distant, planet-wide, century-long enterprise? Today’s industrialized (and post-industrialized) (and, one imagines, post-post- industrialized) economies are sustained not so much by physical wealth as by advanced systems of shared knowledge whose marginal productivity grows as more is accumulated. “Shared,” however, doesn’t mean valueless; we see Virgle as a decidedly for-profit venture that will develop most efficiently via decentralized models of effort, authority and reward. If the first economic revolution was agricultural, the second industrial and the third digital, the fourth will be Open Source — the birthing of a planetary civilization whose development is driven by the unbound human imagination.

We want to engage, one might say, the Long Tail of human creativity. Instead of 5,000 people working 12 hours a day six days a week in exchange for a full salary and benefits, imagine 5 million people working a few hours a week in exchange for contribution-based equity in the form of shares in Virgle Inc and ownership of the land of which the colony will ultimately take some form of possession.

You weren’t thinking real estate? Start. Virgle’s costs will be considerable — we’re planning on up-front investments of $10-15 billion in the first two decades –- but so too will the colony’s long-term earnings. Whatever one’s interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty, for instance, it seems clear that the initial explorers and developers will be able to claim ownership of some significant portion of 143 million square kilometers of Martian real estate, which, sold (or traded as open-source sweat equity) at an average value of $10 per acre, would be worth a cool $358 billion. Multiply that by 100x for its post-terraforming value and you get a figure of $36 trillion. Clearly, whatever model of real estate distribution our emerging society adopts, its worth will exceed the investments likely to be required to unlock that value.

Our civilization’s most valuable export, meanwhile, will be intellectual property. The problems our Pioneers solve in the course of their world-building enterprise will represent an engine of invention in dozens of lucrative areas, from biotechnology to geology, physics to agriculture. We see the community’s system of intellectual property development evolving from a community open source model to commercial open source (or perhaps we mean that the other way around?). We can imagine that commons-based peer production model — in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated into large, meaningful projects, mostly without traditional hierarchical organization or direct financial compensation — extending to almost every imaginable aspect of Martian life.

Lots of competition and activities for becoming the defacto identity system for the future Web.

Facebook pushes Facebook connect

Google pushes Google Friend Connect

While MySpace Embraces DataPortability, Partners With Yahoo, Ebay And Twitter.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

Google wants to help Googlers grow as human beings on all levels. Emotional, mental, physical and ‘beyond the self’… (This) is why Google University instituted the School of Personal Growth, perhaps the first of its kind in a large corporation. We don’t just pamper Googlers, we want to help them fulfill their full human potential.”

With classes available entitled “The Neuroscience of Empathy” and “Search Inside Yourself,” Broecker said the end goal is to help Googlers be more creative by helping them be more relaxed and open to new ideas.

I found it as I was listening to one of the podcast of AudioDharma by Marc Lesser which lectures a course named “Search Inside Yourself” at Google. Quite a title! And I’m dreaming of setting up something like the School of Personal Growth in the research institute where I work…

From webpronews.

I was testing a chat system we’re creating with Extjs (amazin Javascript framework!) and I wanted to test issues with “strange” characters. So I quickly found the page of special characters on Italian wikipedia and I was very surprised to see that there are religious (and political) symbols in Unicode standard characters. What you see in the following are normal chars you can copy and paste, just as a normal “a”. I think the classification under “religious As bru was saying in chat: “wow, lots of crosses” … ;)

A search on Google for “☭” did not return any result. A search for the swastica symbol instead returns results and actually it was once one of the hot terms in Google Trends. I wonder what Unicode characters does Google include and exclude.

By the way, what is the strangest Unicode character you are able to find (for some definition of “strange”)?

It would be great to have offices like the one of Google in Zurich here in FBK in Trento (via Napo).

Made with Slideshow Embed Tool

Maybe you have seen the announcement of the new bigG service: Google Health (see Blogoscoped).
I guess you have heard in the past years many times the “new” (?) terms, right?
E-voting, e-health, e-learning, e-government, e-democracy, e-identity, e-business, e-participation, e-environment, e-weather (if you have heard more, please suggest it in a comment). Just prefix “e-” in front of any oh-so-out-of-fashion word and you have a new keyword you can use to ask funds for new projects.
Now, there would be a lot of concerns about the e-anything by itself. But I was wondering: we haven’t even reach an agreement of what e-anything is (say e-government), how much it is useful, and how to deploy it for real for a better world (this is why we do things, right?) but maybe we are already moving from e-anything to google-anything or g-anything (say google-government)?
Just think about it for a second. Today we got Google-health, which I’m sure will be embraced by many people like you and me.
Tomorrow Google would start offering free (FREE!) services to governments such that governments can cut their costs of managing a state (finance, tax keeping, population registration, etc to 0 (ZERO!). How many countries would resists? That would be the google-government.
You can try to prefix google- to words and think about those services. google-voting, eh? Up up to google-democracy of course! Scary? Well, maybe you think I’m paranoid and this is probably very true but I’m curious to know what you think.
And for the record I use Google free services for most of my needs, so yes, I have already capitulated.

Last pointless point. I hope at least countries will not undergo this path. You know, I would not like to have to call E-stonia and E-Latvia as G-stonia and G-Latvia. Moreover names on maps will become more boring, no? Uhm, did anybody say e-earth google-earth?